The precipitous and painful slide that began with a 38-point thumping in the AFC Championship Game just three years ago, a team then gifted with a young and healthy phenom at quarterback, primed to duel with the mighty Patriots atop the AFC for years to come, culminated Sunday following the Indianapolis Colts' 22-13 season-ending victory over the Houston Texans.

Owner Jim Irsay has fired Pagano after six seasons as head coach, the last three of which failed to produce a playoff appearance. It’s the longest such streak for the Colts since the early 1990s.

"Chuck Pagano provided Colts fans with many exciting wins and memories as head coach of the Colts," Irsay said in a statement. "Throughout his tenure in Indianapolis, he impacted the lives of the players he coached, those who he worked with in the organization and Colts fans across the globe. Chuck's first season was one of the more inspirational stories in NFL history as he courageously battled and overcame leukemia. As a result, his CHUCKSTRONG Foundation has raised millions for cancer research. We are thankful for Chuck's contributions to our franchise and community and we wish him, Tina and the entire Pagano family nothing but the best moving forward."

The move, long expected, arrives almost two years to the day Irsay stunningly handed Pagano and former general manager Ryan Grigson extensions through the 2019 season. Just 24 months later, neither are with the team. The Colts’ sharp regression is the reason why.

Pagano was emotional and reflective following Sunday's season finale, effectively giving a farewell speech to his players after the game. He ran off the field with tears in his eyes, and a few minutes later, owner Jim Irsay handed Pagano the game ball after the victory.

"We fell short and I fell short," he said. "We didn’t meet our goals and I’m sorry that we haven’t hoisted that (Lombardi) trophy yet."

"I got great love and respect for our fans and this community and what they’ve done for me and my family," Pagano said earlier in the afternoon. "I owe them a debt of gratitude. we’ll always be Hoosiers, no matter what happens. I don’t know what tomorrow brings or the next hour. I just know that right now I have a lot of joy in my heart, just knowing how these guys finished, they got hearts of lions. and the players and this organization and again it’s been a blessing.

Pagano's tenure in Indianapolis ends with a 53-43 overall record, though nine wins from the 2012 campaign were credited to Pagano while he battled and eventually beat leukemia and Bruce Arians ably filled in as interim coach.

What sank Pagano after a sterling three-year start that included 33 regular season wins, three playoff appearances and a trip to the 2014 AFC title game was two seasons of mediocrity followed by a dreadful 2017. The Colts’ 4-12 record this year is the franchise’s worst since 2011, when a Peyton Manning-less Colts squad stumbled to 2-14. That led to Irsay’s painful yet ambitious rebuild: the cutting of Manning, the firing of coach Jim Caldwell, the drafting of Andrew Luck. Pagano and Grigson’s arrival in January 2012 signaled a new era. They were going to build the monster, they said.

“We wanna be aggressive, we wanna dictate the tempo,” Pagano said during his introductory press conference in January 2012.

It never happened.

Six seasons later the Colts restart once more.

It began to crumble that day in New England, in January 2015, when Indianapolis was embarrassed 45-7 with a trip to Super Bowl XLIX on the line. Nothing’s gone right since.

Franchise quarterback Andrew Luck has missed 26 of 48 games over the past three seasons, including all 16 this year, while battling a slew of injuries that have muddied the once-promising future of the 2012 No. 1 overall pick. A labrum surgery on his throwing shoulder last January prevented Luck from throwing until late July; despite returning to the active roster for the first month of the season, and practicing for two weeks, Luck was never close to playing in 2017. A setback in his recovery caused the team to put him on injured reserve on Nov. 2. He spent the next month in Europe seeking additional treatment.

Meanwhile, Pagano’s teams were routinely ill-prepared and outmaneuvered; the damaging front-office mistakes of the Grigson era only exacerbated the issues in recent seasons. First-year General Manager Chris Ballard was lured to town last January, handed the keys to the franchise and told to clean up the mess. He dismembered an aging defense and rebuilt it nearly from scratch, seeing tangible process as the season progressed. But this roster was never getting fixed in a single offseason. There’s more work to do. Plenty.

With Luck out, the roster holes and lack of leadership among the players was readily apparent. Pagano’s team never quit on him, but they didn’t play a whole lot of good football, either. Even when the Colts were good this year, they were bad: Five times they blew a fourth-quarter lead in a game they had every right to win. And seven times they blew a halftime lead, just one shy of the NFL record.

Irsay said all along Pagano’s future with the team – last winter, he committed to Pagano only through the 2017 season – wouldn’t rest solely on wins and losses.

“Evaluating Chuck, how many games we win and that sort of thing, it’s going to be based on us really looking at, seeing if some of the areas we felt he had to improve upon to get to that next level, to become that coach who is going to be around 10, 12, 14 years, as a head coach in this league,” Irsay said at the league’s owner meetings in late March.

“Again, it is not a situation where Chuck has to win and win big or else he is gone,” Irsay added. “Chris and I are going to be evaluating his progress in a lot of different ways. A lot of it depends on the health of your team and just the way you feel like you are trending and you are playing.”

Gashed by injuries – the Colts lost 12 starters to injury throughout the season, including the franchise quarterback – Pagano’s team became one of the worst in football.

There’s also this, perhaps the most damning line on Pagano’s résumé: His Colts lost by 27 or more points nine times since 2012, the most of any team in football. That included an embarrassing 46-7 loss in the season-opener in Los Angeles this year and a 27-0 blanking to the Jaguars back in October, the first time the Colts had been shut out in a regular season game in 24 years.

The evaluation is complete. Pagano is out, and Irsay is searching for his third head coach since Tony Dungy retired after the 2008 season.

The Colts have now missed the playoffs for three consecutive seasons, their longest streak since the team missed the postseason for seven straight years from 1988 to ‘94. This past season is also just the second time in the last 16 years the Colts have slogged through a double-digit loss campaign.

Now, Ballard is afforded an opportunity he was not when he accepted the job: He can pick his head coach. Candidates could include Kansas City special teams coordinator Dave Toub, Chiefs offensive coordinator Matt Nagy or New England offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels.

Pagano never delivered the defense he was expected to build in Indianapolis. After coordinating a bruising Baltimore unit in 2011 that finished third overall and came one play shy of the Super Bowl, Pagano was Grigson’s choice to lead the new-look Colts. “PLAYERS WILL RUN THROUGH A BRICK WALL FOR THIS MAN,” Grigson scribbled on a notepad during the interview.

The Colts never finished in the top 10 in total defense under Pagano, and were third from the bottom this year.

Making matters worse: Pagano went 0-9 against the AFC’s top two teams, New England and Pittsburgh, during his six seasons.

Pagano sweated through the past two Decembers, his job security seemingly hanging by a thread, before emerging unscathed. The Colts scraped to 8-8 while Luck missed nine games in 2015. Pagano drove to work on Black Monday that year without a contract extension and without much of an idea if he’d get one. Fourteen hours later, after hours of air-it-out meetings with Irsay and Grigson, whom Pagano routinely feuded with during their five seasons together, the Colts made a stunning announcement: Both weren’t just staying, they’d signed extensions through the 2019 season.

“Let me tell ya – tears fell, voices were raised, but they both came out different people,” Irsay said of a 90-minute, one-on-one meeting between Pagano and Grigson.

“Chained at the hip,” was the phrase Irsay used that night, doubling down on the two men who would continue to lead his franchise. “I could have walked someone in that door with an eight-figure a year (salary) and say, ‘I’m making a big splash.’ If that was the best for us, I would do it. (Pagano) is a great coach.”

It was undoubtedly an emotional day for Pagano. He showed up to work unsure if he was getting fired. He left with a four-year extension.

“I’ve had a lot of great days in my life,” he said at a 10:30 p.m. press conference, “but none better than today. This is absolutely the best day of my life.”

Another 8-8 campaign, dozens of free-agent whiffs and draft misses sealed Grigson’s fate; he was fired in January 2017. Pagano remained on board, eager to work with a new general manager for the first time in his career.

It couldn’t have gone worse. Luck missed the entire offseason, then the entire preseason, then the entire regular season. Pagano’s Colts were embarrassed in Los Angeles in Week 1, 46-9 losers. Their only victories through the first half the season came against the woeful Browns and the woeful 49ers.

The slide that followed was both predictable and painful. The Colts dropped nine of their last 11, often in the same fashion: They’d bolt to an early lead only to blow it in the second half. “A self-fulfilling prophecy,” Pagano called it at one point.

And all along, Pagano was never naïve to his fate. He was noticeably looser in press conferences as the season wore on, less concerned with the minutia of the job, less inclined to spew the trusty clichés he has so often leaned on in the past. Instead, he was a man resigned to his fate. And he was fine with that.

“We’re getting in these tight situations and we’re finding some really unique ways to screw it up, over and over again,” Pagano said after the team’s fifth loss in six games in early December.

Asked about the mental toll the blown leads were having on his team, Pagano went into one of his all-time tangents, referencing the movie Groundhog Day, singing Sonny and Cher and debating the intricacies of tropical storms.

“You spend so much time on Twitter,” he told reporters, “you’re not enjoying the better things in life. Bill Murray, come on. It’s everybody, it’s you guys, it’s the fans. It’s everybody driving up there. It’s everybody in the NFL community. There’s a storm in the Atlantic. Hurricane ‘Whatever’ you want to call it. When’s it going to hit landfall? It’s coming. It’s the middle of the third (quarter). It’s getting late third, they’re up 10, gonna happen sometime. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy right now.

"What’s gonna happen is, being in Miami for six years, when those storms start coming off the coast of Africa and coming through the Atlantic and they start coming up, what happens is you get nor’easter, right? You get a storm up top, when it comes down the pressure hits, right? And it pushes the storm where, back out to sea and it goes up the coast and there’s very little damage. You have to respond. When that happens, we need a storm to blow in and push it so it doesn’t hit land. We’re going to do it. It’s going to happen believe it or not.”

Whatever that means. A few weeks prior, Pagano willingly brought up the single-worst play of his six-year run in Indianapolis, the infamous fake punt against the Patriots in 2015 that instantly became a flashpoint for the Colts’ rising incompetence.

“Lord knows we won’t try anymore fake kicks,” Pagano said. “Appreciate Pete Carroll (the Seahawks coach had recently called a fake punt that went terribly wrong.) ... That’ll be the best thing that happens, when they run me outta here finally, that (fake punt) will be the only thing they show. If you didn’t have guys like myself, like Pete, you wouldn’t have jobs, what the hell would you do? We scored 50 every game, you wouldn’t know what to do? Wouldn’t have jobs. No laptops. No Twitter. Nothing.”

Later in the year, asked directly about his shaky future, Pagano dismissed the uncertainty, leaning instead on the perspective he gained during his cancer fight in 2012 and the unforgiving nature of the NFL.

“You know what you got into,” he said in mid-December. “It’s all I’ve known forever. The shelf life for these jobs is not long. So, you embrace every single opportunity, every single day, every single game. To get to practice with these guys and grind and work and compete and go play games, it’s a blessing. You can’t sit and worry about (potentially getting fired).

“I’m good.”

Of course, this wasn’t the first time Pagano stared his down his fate. Late in the 2015 season, as the rails came off and the Colts missed the playoffs for the first time in his tenure, Pagano was asked about his job security.

“They can’t eat you,” he famously said. “Remember I told you that. They can fire you, but they can’t eat you. So, if the worst thing, a year from now, let’s say, I’m in Boise this time next year playing with my granddaughters, I’m going to be fine. That ain’t going to happen, but I’m going to be fine if I have to go down that road.”

He was right – it didn’t happen in 2015.

But it has now.

"This is our last rodeo together," Pagano told his team before Week 17, and it sure didn't sound like he meant this season.

Chuck Pagano is out after six years in Indianapolis, and Chris Ballard’s mission is to find the man to replace him.

Keefer also writes for The Indianapolis Star, part of the USA TODAY Network.

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